Urban Suburbanization

In the United States, rapid suburbanization has caused a substantial spatial mismatch of jobs and housing. And the growing distance between people and jobs in U.S. metropolitan areas has a negative effect on traffic flow. This phenomenon has resulted in problems such as inefficient energy consumptions, pollutions, and congestion. Urban and transportation planners and policy makers have concerned this adverse effect from the urban growth patterns. Particularly, scholars have begun to consider its undesirable economic impact on a large metro region (Wheaton, 1998). Among many other urban problems, congestion is a major issue in planning and public policy because congestion involves not only personal costs, but also large amount of social costs (Mokhtarian and Raney, 1997).

State, metro, and local transportation planning agencies are responsible not only to investigate the economic loss from the severe traffic congestion, but also to improve mobility performance to improve quality-of-life. By investigating transportation infrastructure and traffic engineering system, transportation engineers and planners have attempted to reduce urban traffic congestion. However, many …show more content…
However, it is believed that severe traffic congestion impedes on time deliveries of freight and people, which results in a large amount of economic loss. According to the 2012 Urban Mobility Report, congestion caused people to travel 5.5 billion hours more and waste 2.9 billion gallons of fuel more, thus the economic loss due to congestion is about $121 billion in 2011. In addition, for important trips it took about an hour for travelers to arrive the destination, which usually takes 20 minutes in light traffic. Some argue that this unreliable travel time causes suburbanization of firms, which may lead to the rapid suburbanization of population as